Cyberattacks Jam Government and Commercial Web Sites in U.S. and South Korea (Still happening)

[Coventina]

Source: New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea — A wave of cyberattacks aimed at 27 American and South Korean government agencies and commercial Web sites temporarily jammed more than a third of them over the past five days, and several sites in South Korea came under renewed attack on Thursday.

The latest bout of attacks, which affected service on one government and six commercial Web sites in South Korea, was relatively minor, and all but two of the sites were fully functional within a few hours, said an official from the state-run Korea Communications Commission.

“An aggressive distribution of vaccine programs against the attack has helped fight back,” the official, Shin Hwa-soo, said. “But we are not keeping our guard down. We are distributing the vaccine programs as widely as possible and monitoring the situations closely because there might be a new attack.”

Officials and computer experts in the United States said Wednesday that the attacks, which began over the July 4 weekend, were unsophisticated and on a relatively small scale, and that their origins had not been determined. They said 50,000 to 65,000 computers had been commandeered by hackers and ordered to flood specific Web sites with access requests, causing them to slow or stall. Such robotic networks, or botnets, can involve more than a million computers.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/technology/10cyber.html?hpw

[Warpy]

1. I had to shut down a couple of hacktivism programs

that I was running in the background, donating bandwidth to people in Iran and Honduras and ?China (but hopefully not to criminals) because I was getting a lot of junk aimed at government agencies who use the same stuff.

I don't know which government is behind this one but I hope they trace it soon and manage to isolate them completely from the net.